Theodore Flynn and Lily Young both outlived their son, Errol Flynn. They also came within just a few years of outliving their grandson, Sean. Like his more famous father, Sean Flynn was addicted to adventure, travel and risk taking. Like his father, it ultimately killed him.
Sean Flynn was born a Hollywood princeling on May 31, 1941, to the infamous Australian actor and French American actress Lili Damita. But Lili, fed up with Errol’s Wicked, Wicked Ways, filed for divorce and fled Los Angeles when Sean was a baby. The boy was raised in Palm Beach, Florida.
Here, Flynn the younger received a good education, as his mother tried to shelter him from the shadow of his father’s scandals. Sean Flynn also attended a boarding school in New Jersey, but it wasn’t long before he heeded the call of adventure – whether to echo his father, or spite him […]
As a teenager, Sean Flynn developed a love for travel while visiting Havana, Cuba. Later on, he went to Pakistan and Africa with the intention of hunting big game. At one point, he became a safari guide in Tanzania.
Shortly after his father’s death, Sean made a brief stab at a Hollywood career. He appeared (uncredited) in the 1960 beach flick Where the Boys Are, and later starred in The Son of Captain Blood (1962), an obvious attempt by the studio to capitalise on the father-son connection of one of Errol’s most famous roles.
But Hollywood was clearly not to Sean’s taste. Instead, he discovered his true calling: photography. More specifically, in true Flynn fashion, wartime photojournalism. His father failed the WWII draft, due to malaria contracted on his earlier travels in New Guinea, a heart murmur, latent pulmonary tuberculosis and, surprise, surprise, various venereal diseases. Sean went to war as a photographer: He covered the Six Day War for Time and Paris Match, but in the late ’60s, there was only one place for a war photojournalist to be: Vietnam.
“The only place in the world where anything’s happening,” he said.
Not only did Flynn fearlessly parachute into combat zones right alongside American soldiers, but he was also credited with saving an Australian platoon by alerting them to a dangerous mine near them.
Flynn became more and more addicted to the danger. He famously documented a Viet Cong suspect hung upside down for interrogation and reported seeing Vietnamese children as young as 10 years old handling “rocket launchers and machine guns like cowboy toys.”
But Flynn’s risk taking escalated just one step too far in 1970. As neighbouring Cambodia descended into the maelstrom of war and communist insurgency, Flynn made the fatal decision to head across the border.
On April 6, 1970, Flynn and some other photographers were leaving Phnom Penh when they learned about a checkpoint that was supposedly manned by the Viet Cong on Highway One. Flynn and another photojournalist, Dana Stone, couldn’t resist the opportunity to document the checkpoint and possibly even interview members of the Viet Cong themselves.
Though most Western journalists covering the Vietnam War traveled around in limos that had once been used by tourists, Flynn and Stone took off on motorcycles to complete the risky assignment.
Another reporter named Stephen Bell, who opted not to go with Flynn and Stone, later recalled, “We headed back to Phnom Penh and no one ever saw them again… I think they were among the first to go missing. It had not reached the point where we knew quite how dangerous it was.”
Neither Flynn nor Stone were ever heard from again. It is widely believed that they were captured by the Viet Cong and held for perhaps as long as a year, before being executed by the Khmer Rouge.
Their remains have never been found.
Flynn’s mother Lili Damita was devastated by her son’s disappearance and presumed death, and spent a fortune trying to find out what exactly happened during her son’s final days and attempting to locate his body. “It has made an old woman of me,” she said of her despair.
Tragically, she never got the chance to properly bury her son, and she battled Alzheimer’s in her own final years before she died in 1994.
Sean Flynn was featured as a character in the 1992 miniseries Frankie’s House and was allegedly the inspiration for Dennis Hopper’s character in Apocalypse Now. The Clash also recorded a song, ‘Sean Flynn’, on their Combat Rock album.
